Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture

241 Pages·2013·1.066 MB·English

by  Dave Boothroyd

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Badiou and Nancy alongside those of Levinas whilst addressing a range
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within cultural life and as assessment of the prospects for an ethico- r
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political resolution of the theory/practice divide. It will appeal to anyone
interested in the ethical dimensions of culture and cultural life.
Dave Boothroyd is Director of Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. He is a founding
co-editor of the open-access international journal for cultural studies and cultural theory,
Culture Machine.
Cover image: Anthony Gormley’s Terracotta Figures Return To Their Birthplace
© Christopher Furlong/Getty Images. ISBN 978-0-7486-4009-6
Cover design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk
www.euppublishing.com
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ETHICAL SUBJECTS IN
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
For A. L.
It is not I, it is the other that can say yes.
(Levinas, Totality and Infinity)
ETHICAL
SUBJECTS IN
CONTEMPORARY
CULTURE
Dave Boothroyd
© Dave Boothroyd, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4009 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8166 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8167 9 (epub)
The right of Dave Boothroyd
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1. The Subject of the Ethical Turn 1
2. Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality 28
3. Sexing the Ethical Subject 48
4. Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility 69
5. The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications 88
6. Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity 106
7. Censored Subjects 124
8. Suffering 145
9. Hospitality, Friendship and Justice 168
10. Death, or the End of the Subject 189
Bibliography 213
Index 223
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed directly or indirectly to the ideas this
book gives expression to. Their encouragement and support, as well
as their incisive comments and criticisms, have been most welcome. It
is not possible to mention them all by name, and there are many, no
doubt, who will not know that their remarks ultimately had an impact.
Some of them were strangers, or were members of the audiences at
the various places where I had the opportunity to present work-in-
progress. During the time of the book’s gestation I have benefitted
greatly from such opportunities: at Depaul University Philosophy
Department; Stockholm University Department of Cinema Studies;
Umeä University Comparative Literature Department; Lisbon New
University; Goldsmiths College Radical Media Group; the Cultures of
the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, as
well as at various conferences. I am grateful for the hospitality shown
to me by all of my hosts and for the many conversations that it made
possible.
I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council
for granting me a Research Leave Scheme sabbatical semester, for a
project closely related to the work presented in this volume.
Special thanks go to following: Terry Andrews, Phil Carney, Tina
Chanter, José Cuhna, Tracy Davis, Gary Hall, Keith Hayward,
John Hutnyk, Manzu Islam, Anders Johansson, Aideen Lucey, Trond
Lundemo, Martin McQuillan, Vince Miller, Diane Morgan, Markus
Öhrn, Larry Ray, Nicholas Royle, Janet Sayers, Sean Sayers, Chris
Shilling, Miri Song, Alex Stevens, Steve Tyler, Mick Ward, Joanna
Zylinska, and the Brightwell crew.
Elements of several of these chapters have appeared elsewhere
in: ‘Touch, Time and Technics: Levinas and the Ethics of Haptic
Communications’, Theory Culture and Society, 26:2–3 (2009), 330–45;
‘Off the Record: Levinas, Derrida and the Secret of Responsibility’,
Theory, Culture and Society, 28:7–8 (2011), 41–59; ‘Beyond Ethics
vi
Acknowledgements vii
I Have No Alibi’, in J. Stauffer and B. Bergo (eds) (2009), Nietzsche
and Levinas: ‘After the Death of a Certain God’, New York: Columbia
University Press, pp. 150–64; ‘To Be Hospitable to Madness: Derrida
and Foucault Chez Freud’, Journal for Cultural Research, 9:1 (2005),
3–21; ‘Skin-nihilism Now’, in K. Ansell-Pearson and D. Morgan (eds)
(2000), Nihilism Now!: Monsters of Energy, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, pp. 198–215; ‘Of Ghostwriting and Possession: translating
“my father”, or s’éxpliquer avec la mort’, in J. Morra, M. Robson and
M. Smith (eds) (2000) The Limits of Death, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, pp. 198–220. Where such elements occur they are
reproduced with permission of the publishers.

1. The Subject of the
Ethical Turn
In the second half of the twentieth century cultural theorists of moder-
nity and practitioners of cultural studies tended to see their intellectual
endeavour as being fundamentally political in nature. Marxist and
neo-Marxist left criticism of culture and society until relatively recently,
has been the traditional mainstay of analysis addressing the ‘post-WW2
order’, the ‘end of empire’, the fate of the communist project and the
numerous crises of globalisation. Over the last twenty years, however,
we have witnessed an ‘ethical turn’ in the theorising of culture, society
and politics, as well as of the arts and creative enterprise, which has
coincided with and drawn upon the full diversity of postmodern theory.
As the modern notion of universality has lost credibility, the concern
with ‘the ethical’ has proliferated and territorialised both the academic
disciplines and popular culture. Rather than ethics being confined as
sub-branch of philosophy, viewed as the ‘queen of the sciences’ whose
job it has been to guard and preserve the idea of the universality in the
temple of pure theory, it has now leaked back out into the wider world
of cultural inquiry in general. Philosophical ethics in its traditional
forms can no longer exclusively provide the measure for the ethical
evaluation of situations, events, and social and political phenomena
making up the content of cultural life in general, and ethicality, however
it is to be understood, has come to be read off of the surfaces of culture
itself. Philosophy, no more or less than any other intellectual enterprise,
it has to be acknowledged, is just one of the surfaces of culture.
It is from within the ‘postmodern condition’, heralded by the
Nietzschean proclamation of ‘the death of God’ and understood,
for example by Lyotard, in relation to the economic production of
knowledge, that ethics has resurfaced as a watchword in contemporary
critical studies of almost everything: from the phenomena of globalised
capitalism to the cultural heterogeneity of national life; from the
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